This matter is far from settled. Rackspace appears to have acted
precipitiously in response to a US court order to act on servers located
in the UK, ostensibly under a treaty for mutual aid in law enforcement.
Initiation was by Switzerland to attempt to protect two of its undercover
police monitoring a demo in Italy. The two were photographed and their
photos posted on an Indymedia site in France. Switzerland asked for
Italian assistance, and the two in turn asked for US and UK assistance.
This multi-nation cooperation is covered by the mutual assistance treaty.
The FBI has stated that it has no investigation of the matter, that it
only served to convey the Swiss/Italian mutual assistance request to the
US company and its UK subsidiary. The US company apparently did not
contest the court order, and claims in a statement that it acted as "a
good corporation."
This is not unprecedented. Some years ago several US ISPs removed material
on sites at the request of foreign governments. They acted unilaterally,
without court order, merely upon the request of the governments. Some of
these incidents were made public, competing ISPs offered to refuse to
abide such requests, and customers abandoned those who cooperated with the
authorities.
This method can be used against Rackspace. Indeed, it is likely that
Rackspace awaits public outcry, and customers leaving, in order to have
grounds to resist the thinly justified action in this case.
Recall that the US DoJ is regularly bluffing and faking its attack on
alleged terrorist suspects and political dissidents. Other countries are
following the US in this vile practice. They cover for each other with
these obnoxious mutual assistance treaties, in which fingers are pointed
after the dirty deeds are done.
In this case, US law has been trashed by the treaties, and the FBI
laughably says it had no say. That the US must break its law in order to
get other countries to break theirs in exchange. Shell gamism, and worse
likely to come unless there is loud, strong and lasting protest.
There should be a campaign to boycott Rackspace, then on to other targets
yet to be identified. US ISPs should join the protest on their own behalf
and that of their customers. First off, there must be a challenge to keep
confidential orders from governments to hand over customer information.
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net